The name of our Lord is not mentioned, yet these “principles” would
be words of little meaning but for His life on earth, His death,
His resurrection, and His glorious reign. It was He who taught us to
say “Our Father.” New ideas were poured by Him into the Roman world.
“One is your teacher, and you are all brothers.”[30] “The King will
answer them, ‘I tell you truly, in so far as you did it to one of
these brothers of mine, even to the least of them, you did it to
me.’”[31] The Risen Saviour said on Easter morning, “Go to my brothers
and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and yours, to my God and
yours.’”[32] Though exalted far above all heavens, “He is not ashamed
to call them brothers.”[33] His followers believe in the communion
of saints. The ministry of angels is not strange to them, since
“angels came and ministered to Him.” His teaching on responsibility,
compensation and retribution is the highest yet vouchsafed to mankind.
If continuous existence is the master-chord of Spiritualism, it was
He who brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel, who
showed to dying men the path of life. Why, then, is His name omitted
from the “Seven Principles” of Spiritualism? The challenge cannot be
put aside. The question goes sounding through the ages to every new
discipleship, “What think ye of Christ?”
II
Impatience and annoyance seem to be roused in certain Spiritualists
when the question is put to them. Mr. J. Arthur Hill, in the concluding
pages of his best-known volume,[34] refers to the complaint of “a
clerical reviewer of a recent book of mine ... that I nowhere stated
my belief regarding Christ.”
“It seemed a curious objection,” he goes on, “and it had not occurred
to me that anyone would expect Christology in a book mainly describing
psychical investigations.” He refers to “technical theological details
on which I am incompetent to pronounce,” and adds that “Spiritualists
seem for the most part to be uninterested in the subtleties of the
Trinitarian doctrine. All venerate the person and teaching of Jesus.”
The writer expresses his own belief that “Jesus may have belonged to
some order higher than ours.” “I admit,” he says, “that I have felt
this about Emerson.... Consequently, I sympathise with those who, being
rightly humble about their own persons, but rating others and human
possibilities in general too low, feel the necessity of regarding Jesus
as more than man.”
It is strange that a writer of Mr. Hill’s intelligence should forget
that we are living in a Christian land, and that Spiritualism professes
to bring new certainties about the future life to those whose hope and
anchor on futurity has hitherto rested wholly in the Christian faith.
He goes as far as he possibly can to meet the inquiries of Christian
readers, but evidently thinks it unfair that they should tease him.
That is the surprising thing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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